DeathWeb (Fox Meridian Book 3) (16 page)

‘I see it as my duty to ensure that the refit has worked as specified and that my customers have no complaints.’

‘Uh-huh. You’re not fooling anyone, you know?’

‘I know. Don’t care.’

‘That’s my girl.’

26
^th
June.

‘There are visitors at the door,’ Belle announced, appearing in Sam’s lounge beside Fox. ‘Mister and Mrs Meridian. Kit informed me that they might be arriving.’

Fox glanced around. Everyone was dressed in something reasonably appropriate. Vaughn’s little spaghetti-strapped top and faded jeans were not something Fox had ever expected to see her in, but the look worked and was decent. Marie was in one of her brightly coloured cropped tops and shorts, fairly normal. Sam actually had a shirt on. ‘Let them in, please, Belle. I’ll go down and meet them. Everyone okay with me bringing them here before I take them upstairs?’

No one declined, though Marie suddenly looked flustered, and Fox set off at a jog to go down to the front hall. The couple looked up as Fox trotted down the stairs; Jonathan smiled. He was back in a sweatshirt and jeans though Fox had spotted him in a fashionable, high-collared suit at the banquet. Andrea was wearing a flimsy little camisole top in a semi-transparent, candy-striped fabric with a matching bikini bra under it, an almost indecently short dark blue skirt, and white, high-heeled clogs. Her wardrobe had changed
a lot
in the last decade and Fox was not quite sure what to make of it.

‘Is it always so
hot
in this city?’ Andrea asked. ‘I thought I’d melt just walking over from the maglev.’

‘In summer, yeah. Always was, or so I’m told, but global warming didn’t do anything to help. We get rain too, but it’s warm rain. Even the big storms that swing up from the Atlantic tend to leave the place sweating.’

‘This is… very nice.’ Andrea looked around at the wood panelling of the hall. ‘You must be doing well.’

‘Well, I am, but the house is shared. Come on up and meet the others.’ She let them start up and then turned, leading the way through to where her friends had settled, taking a break from organising Sam’s possessions. ‘Everyone, this is Jonathan and Andrea, my parents. And Marie you two have met. She lives in the basement flat. This floor is Sam’s, and he’s the house’s owner.’

Sam took Jonathan’s offered hand. ‘Sam Clarion. I was Fox’s next-door neighbour until I inherited this place, and I suppose I’m her landlord now.’

Andrea gave Sam a big smile as she shook his hand. ‘People usually call me Andy,’ she said.

‘And Alice Vaughn is the CMO of Palladium and not a house mover.’

‘I was in charge of the renovations on the house,’ Vaughn said, smiling and shaking hands. ‘Since I was in town, I wanted to see how everyone was settling in.’

‘Nice meeting you all,’ Jonathan said. His smile was broad and not quite as fake as Andrea’s. That said, Andrea seemed in a brighter mood than she had been most of the week.

‘I’d imagine you’re happy with the way things went at the conference?’ Vaughn asked.

‘It went as I expected,’ Andrea replied. ‘I think even those who think it’s a bad idea expect this to pass.’

‘Unless there’s a quite remarkable change in opinion before the second of August, yes. We’ll be ready for it. It’ll take at least six months for the legal niceties to be ironed out and we’ll have all our products and services fully ready long before then.’

‘We’ll go up and leave this lot to shifting things,’ Fox said. ‘See you in a bit, guys.’

Upstairs, Fox took her parents to the lounge. ‘Sorry if the place looks a little spartan, Dad. There’s some VR decoration on top of the basic.’

‘It looks nice. Art deco, right?’ Jonathan pulled a glasses case from his pocket and put on a visor-like pair of specs with a thickened earpiece which suggested a VR set. ‘Oh yeah, not much in addition. I like it.’

‘Ah, well since you can see the v-tags now, you should meet the other members of the household. Belle, Kit, would you mind showing yourselves?’

The two avatars appeared, Kit waving and Belle executing a small bow, which seemed to fit their personalities quite well.

‘We met Belle on the door screen,’ Andrea said. ‘I’d assumed she was human.’

‘Belle is the household AI,’ Fox explained. ‘One of MarTech’s latest. She’s housed down in the basement, but she can be anywhere she needs to be. Kit is my personal assistant. That’s her server over by the wall. Drinks? Something cold, perhaps? Do we have any beer, Belle?’

‘I have cold beer in stock,’ Belle replied smoothly. ‘There is wine in the cooler as well as a variety of soft drinks.’

‘Beer, Dad? Mom, you’ll have a glass of wine?’ Getting nods, Fox smiled. ‘Two glasses of wine then, Belle, and a beer. Let’s sit down.’ Belle vanished with another bow of the head.

‘Your PA seems to have an unusual avatar design,’ Andrea said as she arranged herself on the sofa. Fox took the chair and let her father sit beside her mother.

‘I am a Kitsune dash five nine two personal AI, Mrs Meridian,’ Kit said. ‘My form was selected to match the name. Currently my series is not on the market, but will be soon.’

‘Jackson and Terri like throwing experimental kit at me for product testing,’ Fox added. ‘Apparently I’m good at it. Kit helps me with investigations, which is not something they originally planned but it’s worked well.’

‘Of course, we saw the reports about you rescuing Teresa Martins from terrorists,’ Andrea said.

‘Twice,’ Jonathan added.

‘She’s under orders not to let it happen again,’ Fox replied, ‘but that UA cell is now dead or in Rikers, so she’s probably safe.’

‘United Anarchy are still not your favourite people, I take it.’

‘Not really. You’re still farming, Dad?’

Jonathan seemed to accept the change of subject without qualms. ‘Not like I did. Got enough money together to buy a patch of my own. We’re not entirely self-sufficient, but between what I can grow to eat and sell we do okay, and there’s enough to let us do the political work we want to do.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine you approve of that part,’ Andrea said, and the smile was too flat again.

Fox stared at her for a second and then spoke before Jonathan could intervene. ‘I don’t like your politics, Mom, but I’m proud of you.’ Andrea’s eyes widened: she had not expected
that
. ‘You’re actually standing up and doing something about what you believe in. I respect that. That’s why I left. I wanted to take action, not talk about it. You didn’t understand that at the time.’

‘I… may have been… less than supportive.’ And Fox was fairly sure that was as close to an apology as she was going to get. ‘You’ve come a long way since you became a soldier.’

‘Army transferred me to the UNTPP. I was one of their top antiterrorism ops and they wanted someone like that in the new agency.’ Fox sighed. ‘The trouble with them
and
NAPA is the politics. It messes everything up. People are more concerned with how things will look than they are with getting the job done. This damn conference was more of the same. I’d be pissed off more, but the murderer I’m hunting at the moment is a slippery one and he’s technically NAPA’s case.’

‘Everyone heard about the body they found,’ Jonathan said. ‘That the man?’

‘That’s him. Kit’s been working his profile. The girl we found this week is his twelfth victim worldwide. He’s clever, meticulous, and mad as a bag of cats. But… I think he’s back in America for a reason. Back in New York for a reason. I think we’re going to nail him soon.’

Fox paused and looked around as one of the arachnoform house drones came in with a tray of drinks balanced on its back. She stood up to hand out the drinks. ‘Thanks, Belle. Anyway, modern policing is complicated, especially on a case like this. I was negative about your chances of clearing up homicides before, but out in the Belt it’s not the same. You’ll mostly be dealing with domestics. Single deaths or groups of family members. As long as your investigators remember to question close relatives, boyfriends, and girlfriends, they’ll do okay. But the folks I remember from back there will try to find an outsider first. That’s where the training comes in. And I didn’t want to start this discussion over again.’

‘Ah,’ Jonathan said, ‘well, we did want to bring something up that’s related.’

‘That wasn’t why we asked to come,’ Andrea added hurriedly, ‘but we got some news from home last night which… Do you remember the Batesons?’

Fox frowned, having to drag up her own memory since it had been before her implant. ‘Mal and Crystal? They had a daughter not long before I left.’

‘Sandy,’ Jonathan supplied, nodding. ‘Sandy has gone missing. NAPA suspect she’s run off to Chicago or Detroit and they’re looking for her there, but Mal thinks she was taken.’

‘Taken?’

‘There were people up from the Southern Protectorate this week for the market. Mal thinks one of them, maybe a group, grabbed her.’

‘We have a fund,’ Andrea said. ‘Lots of local people put into it to hire… extra security if it’s needed. Part of that supports the Watch, but we’d like to hire you to come home and see if your technology can find Sandy.’

Fox frowned. ‘Mom, if she’s gone down into there…’

‘You can’t do worse than NAPA have already done. Call it an exercise in proving to us that what you have can do something we need. You
know
we have trouble from the dustbowl gangs from time to time.’

Taking a drink, Fox considered her options and decided that she had one. There was a girl missing and possibly the captive of a gang of thugs. ‘I’ll run it past my management. I can fly out on Monday if they give me the go-ahead.’

Part Three: Dust, Sweat, and Tears

Topeka Agri-Zone, 28
^th
June 2060.

Hot wind from the south, driven across miles of flat arable land and then superheated to incandescence across the airfield, smacked into Fox’s face as she stepped out of the hangar which had been arranged for Pythia’s vertol. Or that was what it felt like anyway. ‘Damn. Mom complained about New York? I’d forgotten this place broils in the summer.’

‘Temperature and humidity figures
are
a little higher here,’ Kit agreed. She, of course, looked perfectly comfortable.

‘Just be thankful you can’t actually feel it.’ Looking south, Fox stared off into the distance, imagining the conditions three hundred kilometres away. Down toward Tulsa, where there was still a community worth giving the title to, the dust started. The boundary between the Kansas Belt and the Southern Protectorate followed the old Kansas state line down there, but that had been a matter of drawing maps. They still ran livestock down there, mostly sheep genetically modified for the conditions: more like goats really, someone had actually trademarked the design and called them arigeep, but the name had never really stuck.

‘We’re loaded up,’ Jonathan Meridian said. Fox turned and flashed her father a smile. ‘I’ve never seen a computer like that on wheels.’

‘Pythia’s designed to deploy where she’s needed. So they built her to unlatch from her mountings and move around. She’s not exactly fast, and she’s only got an hour before she needs to be put back on the mains, but she’s mobile. Thanks for coming out with the truck, Dad.’

‘Hey, we invited you down here to do this. Eddy Watts has the truck and barely uses it, and me driving means we don’t need to worry anyone else. You can set that big box up in the workshop. There’s air conditioning and three-phase power. No internet line, though.’

‘She’ll do fine over radio.’

‘Right. You still remember how to drive a Q-bug?’

Fox laughed as she followed him back into the hangar. ‘I think I can still manage to avoid crashing. Jackson will be envious. He told me it was a shame people didn’t drive anymore.’

‘Seems like a sensible man, considering he’s some sort of genius.’

‘Jackson is… complicated. And nice. He’s a nice guy. I think you’d like him. You’d disagree on politics and, obviously, he’s way more into technology than you, but he’s sensible, steady. He’d do anything for his daughter.’

‘Yeah, well… can’t really say we compare there, considering.’ Going silent, he climbed into the cab of the box truck he had borrowed and waited for Fox to get aboard. The engine, alcohol-fuelled, throbbed into life. ‘When you left, we all said some things that maybe we shouldn’t have let stand like that.’

‘We were all pretty angry.’

‘Maybe, but we shouldn’t have left it this long. You’re our child, Fox. Parents shouldn’t let their kids slip away like that without trying.’ He pulled the truck out and started across the concrete for the perimeter fence.

‘Same could be said for kids and their parents. In the Army, I was too busy, and too pissed off, to do anything. In the UNTPP… I met a guy, Pieter. We weren’t really talking about it, but there was an undercurrent of potential marriage. He was big on family, both parents still alive, two brothers and a sister. Dutch. His family had money. He wanted me to get back in touch with you. Didn’t nag or anything, but he’d quietly push it and I was breaking down.’

‘Lots of past tense in there.’

‘He was on my team when we went into MarTech Dallas.’

‘Ah. I didn’t realise it cost you that much.’

‘Yeah. Well, after that I wasn’t very social. Two years in New York and I had three friends. Two of those were Jackson and Terri. Sam’s hard not to get on with and he was next door. We were in and out of each other’s apartments and he’d drag me out to clubs. I mostly worked, finding my feet with NAPA, trying to bury being the so-called hero of Dallas.’

‘You and Sam… you’ve, uh…’

Fox grinned. ‘No, me and Sam haven’t uh. He’s a licensed prostitute and bodyguard. He doesn’t do much recreational sex and I needed a friend, not a lover.’

Jonathan was silent for a moment: Fox figured he was a little shocked, maybe a lot. ‘Well, he certainly was a good-looking man.’

‘You have no idea. Trained in martial arts, body like a god. Tends to walk around barefoot and with no shirt on.’